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elfsI've just finished two stories today. The first is Joe Abercrombie's The First Law: The Blade Itself, which I picked up at Foolscap earlier this year and have finally got about to reading. It's a rollicking good tale, not quite generic fantasy product and certainly filled with some pretty damn good characterization. The publisher's blurb behind that link lies about some details and fails to tell you about the really interesting characters, like The Dogman, The Black Dow, Ardee and Ferro-- a real cast of characters.
Abercrombie's writing is solid, crisp, serious or funny depending upon the need, and his grasp of the use of language and even thought patterns when he's inhabiting a point of view is really remarkable. But while his descriptions of both banter and battle are masterful, his static sets in the city of Agriont feel just like that... sets. His work feels like that of an excellent playwright stretching out into his first novels. Still, I do plan on reading the second book.
The other story I read was Phillip Lopate's "Goes Long," which starts out as a rumination about cocksmanship, a long essay about how men approach the sex act. Lopate's protagonist confesses that he doesn't understand the whole "all night long" thing; he'd rather go long enough, then roll over and snooze or chat. His female friends tell him, however, that sex should either be so hot it's over with fast, or so good it goes on for a long time. "Most sex," they tell him, "is not good sex."
What astonished me about this story, and I will spoil it for you if you plan on reading it, is that the story is much less about cocksmanship that it is about the way men and women approach the subject of sex and relationships. Lopate goes from a long-view of the sex relations down to a specific relationship between himself and a woman named Nina. The relationship isn't terribly good; they never do figure out how to talk to each other, and in bed they're practiced and worldly but never quite... right. They break up and a year later, he gets a call from her inviting him out to lunch.
They meet, and Lopate can't keep his eyes off her. Conversation sparkles. They're having a delightful afternoon together. He soon is immolated by a desire to go back to her apartment and have sex with her. And then Nina drops her bomb: the entire lunch, she says, was for her closure. To affirm that her decision a year ago was the correct one. The ending is brutal: "I now realized that, with unintentional gallantry, I had been sitting here all this time, helping to erase myself from her troubled heart." (And isn't that just a gorgeous sentence? I could spend all day admiring that sentence alone. But there are many like it in Lopate's writing.)
It was one of those eye-opening moments when a story reminds of you how and why to write short stories. Lopate had taken a universal issue-- men's preoccupation with their "performance"-- and introduced it as a topic, a theme, only at the last moment to create an utterly profound illustration about a far more interesting theme, how men and women think about things differently, and does so with the sharp jab of a very dull knife, which he then twists for two or three paragraphs before-- and I won't tell you how-- he delivers the punch line that makes you go, "Oh."
Oh.
Abercrombie's writing is solid, crisp, serious or funny depending upon the need, and his grasp of the use of language and even thought patterns when he's inhabiting a point of view is really remarkable. But while his descriptions of both banter and battle are masterful, his static sets in the city of Agriont feel just like that... sets. His work feels like that of an excellent playwright stretching out into his first novels. Still, I do plan on reading the second book.
The other story I read was Phillip Lopate's "Goes Long," which starts out as a rumination about cocksmanship, a long essay about how men approach the sex act. Lopate's protagonist confesses that he doesn't understand the whole "all night long" thing; he'd rather go long enough, then roll over and snooze or chat. His female friends tell him, however, that sex should either be so hot it's over with fast, or so good it goes on for a long time. "Most sex," they tell him, "is not good sex."
What astonished me about this story, and I will spoil it for you if you plan on reading it, is that the story is much less about cocksmanship that it is about the way men and women approach the subject of sex and relationships. Lopate goes from a long-view of the sex relations down to a specific relationship between himself and a woman named Nina. The relationship isn't terribly good; they never do figure out how to talk to each other, and in bed they're practiced and worldly but never quite... right. They break up and a year later, he gets a call from her inviting him out to lunch.
They meet, and Lopate can't keep his eyes off her. Conversation sparkles. They're having a delightful afternoon together. He soon is immolated by a desire to go back to her apartment and have sex with her. And then Nina drops her bomb: the entire lunch, she says, was for her closure. To affirm that her decision a year ago was the correct one. The ending is brutal: "I now realized that, with unintentional gallantry, I had been sitting here all this time, helping to erase myself from her troubled heart." (And isn't that just a gorgeous sentence? I could spend all day admiring that sentence alone. But there are many like it in Lopate's writing.)
It was one of those eye-opening moments when a story reminds of you how and why to write short stories. Lopate had taken a universal issue-- men's preoccupation with their "performance"-- and introduced it as a topic, a theme, only at the last moment to create an utterly profound illustration about a far more interesting theme, how men and women think about things differently, and does so with the sharp jab of a very dull knife, which he then twists for two or three paragraphs before-- and I won't tell you how-- he delivers the punch line that makes you go, "Oh."
Oh.
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The Steel Remains
Date: 2009-02-01 10:49 pm (UTC)Re: The Steel Remains
Date: 2009-02-02 12:03 am (UTC)Re: The Steel Remains
Date: 2009-02-02 01:26 am (UTC)The Steel Remains brings a lot of new and unusual stuff to the sword-and-sorcery genre. I liked it, but it sure wasn't what I expected. I hadn't even heard of it before I saw a copy of the book. The cover copy described a book that wasn't what I expected from Morgan's publishing history. The first three pages weren't what I expected from the cover copy. The first quarter of the book wasn't what I expected from the first three pages. The rest of the book... well, you get the idea.
Still, it's interesting and very imaginative. :-)
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no subject
Date: 2009-02-06 06:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-06 03:26 pm (UTC)